It was then built in relation to the solstices.Scientists also found struck flint and bone fragments in dirt recovered from the shafts. ‘There were some nice cores, and some really lovely leaf-shaped arrowheads. This earthwork lies about 4km north-west of Stonehenge, on Ministry of Defence (MOD) land beyond the boundary of the World Heritage Site (WHS) centred on the famous megalithic monument. Then we found another ditch terminus, and then another,’ remembers Steve Thompson, Site Director for Wessex Archaeology. These form a ring 2 km (1.2 mi) wide that encompasses Durrington Walls, the neighboring site of Woodhenge, and an even older structure called the Larkhill Causewayed Enclosure. Instead, it looks like they were making it up as they went along, or working to their own plan. A series of large, circular pits (up to 20m diameter and a depth of 5 metres) could have formed part of a circuit of large pits around Durrington Walls (near Stonehenge), and may have incorporated the recently discovered, Larkhill causewayed enclosure #DurringtonPits
‘So, by then it was pretty clear that we were dealing with a segmented ditch! The…‘When we started stripping off the topsoil, we saw a ditch terminus. Slender gullies created when the ground surface repeatedly froze and then thawed during the last Ice Age – long before the causewayed enclosure was built – survive on the lip of the pits and show that the differences in depth are not down to preservation. Each hole is more than 5 yards (5 meters) deep and almost 11 yards (10 meters) in diameter. It really suggests that people need to start looking beyond the boundaries of the WHS to find out what’s happening to the north.’ When seen alongside Robin Hood’s Ball, the position of the Larkhill monument suggests that instead of the causewayed enclosures being on the periphery of the ceremonial landscape, in the early Neolithic period the focus was to the north of the later site of Stonehenge.If the causewayed enclosure was one of the first permanent structures to be dug into the Wiltshire chalk, it was certainly not the last. The site was designated as … The haphazard enclosure ditches met their polar opposite thousands of years later when a set of practice trenches were cut into the hillside during the First World War. Cursuses are often a bit later than the causewayed enclosures, but there can be some overlap, and the relationship between the two cursuses and the two enclosures fits very nicely. But with the Durrington Shafts, it’s not the passing of time, but the bounding by a circle of shafts which has cosmological significance.”So far, 20 of these vertical passageways have been found, each placed at a radius of more than nine football fields (864 meters) from Durrington Walls at its center.